tight show here, but the ops center is run by soldiers, and soldiers are not perfect.”
“Yessir, I sure understand that. But I imagine the reason all these teams have to report in twice a day is because they’re operating behind enemy lines. I mean, aren’t those reports really the only way you have to be sure they’re still alive? Wouldn’t some major alarm bells go off if they failed to report?”
“No, not necessarily,” the general said. “In most cases, I think the ops staff would wait before pushing the panic button.”
“Wait for what?”
“Say the team missed the morning report, they might wait until the evening report. Certainly, if a team missed making two sitreps in a row, then flags would go up.”
“And what would that mean? What would happen if a team stopped reporting?”
“We’d increase the aerial recon over their sector. If that didn’t get us anywhere, we might insert a recon team to see what we could discover. We know the locations of their base camps, so we’ve got a general footprint for a search.”
“But none of that happened when Sanchez’s team missed its reports?”
“No.”
“Should it have happened, General?”
He gave me a royally pissed-off look. “Look, the team still made it out okay, all right? No harm, no foul. We haven’t lost a team yet, so I guess we’re doing something right.”
Nobody likes being second-guessed, but General Chuck Murphy obviously liked it less than most people. That’s the problem with being told all your life that you’re something special. You might eventually start to believe it. That big jaw of his was now protruding like the prow of a battleship and his mood was very brackish. I could see I’d about worn out my welcome. Actually, that’s not true. I hadn’t really been welcome in the first place.
I looked at my watch. “Oops. Hey, sir, I really gotta run. I’m supposed to be taking another deposition.”
That wasn’t really true, either. I just couldn’t resist giving him the bum’s rush for a change. I left the way I came in and steered a wide path around that big, beefy sergeant major of his.
I hurried to the Operations Center, which was located in another of the ubiquitous wooden buildings, about five down from Murphy’s headquarters. The guard at the entrance spent about thirty seconds trying to tell me why I wasn’t allowed to enter this supersecret facility before I finally whipped out the nice little set of orders the Secretary of the Army had helpfully provided me. According to these orders, I could enter the White House situation room if I so desired. No kidding.
I followed a trail of stenciled signs that took me down a long hallway, then down a dimly lit stairway. In the basement there was another guard standing before a metal door, but fortunately he and the guard upstairs were in telepathic contact, so all I had to do was whip out my identification card, which was enough for him to confirm that I was, indeed, the exact same asshole with all-inclusive orders his buddy had just met upstairs.
The metal door was flung open, and I instantly entered the next century. Special Forces have almost unlimited budgets, and General Partridge’s boys had spared no expense when they equipped this ops center. A whole wall was covered with a massive electronic map of Kosovo. It was peppered with lots of tiny blinking dots, some red, some green, and some blue. There were three whole banks of Sun microstations manned by grim-looking men who hovered earnestly over their keyboards. Another wall was lined with high-tech communications consoles, where about ten communicators sat very alertly with special headphones on their ears. It looked like AT amp;T’s global nerve center, only all the workers in this room wore battle dress and natty little green berets. Well, everybody except me, of course.
I stood for a while and watched and listened to the bustling activity. Like nearly all the ops centers I’d been in, most of the business was conducted in low decibels. There was this constant, low hum of voices and computer keys being mashed and radio messages being received. Every now and again, somebody dashed across the floor, either carrying a message to some other part of the cell or coordinating some activity. A hulking monster wearing sergeant major’s stripes sat at a big wooden desk in the middle of the floor. Although there were a fair number of officers present, it was clear that this sergeant major was the big boss of this machine and its many moving parts.
After a while, he glanced over and saw me standing observantly in the corner. I apparently aroused his curiosity. He kept glancing over for the next five minutes, until he finally got up from his desk, went to the corner, fixed himself a fresh cup of coffee, then walked over. That’s when I noticed he’d fixed himself two cups of coffee. I also noticed his hands. They were so big and beefy that the coffee cups looked like a couple of thimbles.
His hands matched the rest of him. He was a big, rough-looking man who obviously had had his nose broken at least a few times. He had an enormous, ugly head that seemed to be connected directly to his shoulders, because his neck was the size of a tree stump. He had the standard Special Forces crew cut, and floppy ears that made him look sort of elephantine. A tall man, too, maybe six foot three, with broad, ponderous shoulders.
He squinted at my nametag and the JAG emblem on my collar, then broke into a wide grin. “You the same guy doing the investigation?” he asked.
“Yeah. Thanks,” I said, quickly grabbing a coffee cup from his hand before he could decide he didn’t want to talk with me and wandered off in search of someone else to hand the coffee to. This made it too awkward for him to try to move on without making himself appear to be my personal errand boy.
His nametag read Williams, and I said, “I take it you’re the ops sergeant.”
“Yup. Welcome to my kingdom.”
“My compliments, Sergeant Major. Looks like a pretty tight ship.”
“We try. Gets a little kinky when you’re running U.S. teams, KLA teams, and trying to keep watch on the bad guys at the same time.”
“Thank God this ain’t a war, huh?”
“Say that again.” He chuckled. “If we’d fought this way in the Gulf War, the Iraqis would still be grilling hot dogs in Kuwait.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Christ, a little girl with one leg could fight a better war than this.”
“How many teams are there?”
“Right now, we’ve got nine U.S. teams inside Kosovo. Then there are sixteen KLA units.”
“You’ve got nine SF teams and another sixteen with the KLA?”
“No. There are nine KLA teams operatin’ with our guys and another seven KLA units without A-teams.”
“I didn’t know there were KLA units operating without Guardian Angels.”
“We call ’em GTs… uh, graduate teams.”
“Graduate teams?”
“Yeah. Every KLA unit that goes in starts with baby-sitters, till they’ve done three or four successful missions. Then we cut ’em loose. We still supply ’em, and a few have liaison cells, but they operate more or less independently.”
“They any good?” I asked.
He took my arm and ushered me over to the huge electronic map on the wall. He looked it over for a moment, then pointed toward a blue dot located in the northeastern corner of Kosovo.
“Red dots are Serbs, green dots are our guys, blue dots are KLA. That’s GT team seven there. One of the first teams we formed. Nearly every man had at least a tour in the old Yugoslav army. The commander was an infantry major.”
“They’re pretty deep inside,” I remarked.
“We try to keep the rookie teams as close to the Macedonian border as we can. That way, they get in over their head, it’s a short walk out.”
I stared up at the dot that represented team seven. “That a good team?”
“Very damn good.”
“What have you got them doing?”
“As we speak, they’re pinpointing targets for the flyboys. We issued ’em some laser designators. See that line right there?” He pointed at a string of blinking red dots that were aligned from the northeast to the southwest. “That’s the Serbs’ main supply route. About half the Serbs’ ammo and supplies come down that artery. Team seven’s got guys positioned all along it. They heat up the targets with the lasers every time we’ve got an F-16 that’s got a few extra bombs or missiles to unload.”
